Radio

Here are some radio shows and radio series I did for CBC IDEAS, with host Paul Kennedy and executive producer Bernie Lucht. Push the little arrows and listen! Notes on the shows are at the end of this page.

Gilbert Reid’sFrance

Produced for Ideas on CBC Radio 1

Gilbert Reid’sItaly

Produced for Ideas on CBC Radio 1

War Science

Produced for Ideas on CBC Radio 1

How HumansInvented Animals

Produced for Ideas on CBC Radio 1

Seduction,Pleasures ofthe Flesh, andMating Games

Produced for Ideas on CBC Radio 1

End of Utopia:No Way Out

Produced for Ideas on CBC Radio 1

Here is a selection of broadcast Canadian television and radio work, plus work presently in production:

Recent Radio& Television Work

For some reason – probably because I'd lived for many years in France and Italy – the IDEAS folk were initially under the impression that I was an expert in sex and seduction, so I did several programs on various aspects of that particular human, and animal activity: Seduction, The Mating Game, and The Pleasures of the Flesh (this last program was on French eroticism, the tradition that encompasses great gallantry and great cruelty, and which gives legitimacy to the relationship between power and sex, from the writings of the Marquis de Sade to Anne Desclos' masochistic masterpiece of The Story of O.

I had also done some television series on the First World War and on the Second World war. I had become fascinated by the technological developments during the First World War. The cliche - repeated by all of us - was that the generals were stupid donkeys not interested in new technology, and that they sent their men blindly into battles which were merely slaughter houses. There was a fair bit of truth in this but I think it needed a corrective. It is very tempting to call the people of the past idiots – they were, on the whole, just as intelligent as we are, perhaps more so. But they faced different circumstances. Briefly, the technology of killing had by 1914 reached a level which made quick decisive victories virtually impossible; the generals were eager for any new device or technology which could break this murderous stalemate; and, as a result, technology advanced by leaps and bounds during the war – fighter planes, bombers, poisoned gas, tanks, hand held automatic weapons, and many other innovations were spawned in the four years of fighting. So the First World War was, as wars often are, a great accelerator of invention and technological innovation, and the generals were eager to have any new weapon that could be put into their hands.

The period after the Second World War was rich in utopian thinking; there were the technological and capitalist utopian programs of continual scientific advance, of endless economic growth,of managed social harmony, of happy clean suburbs, and of the progressive elimination of disease and poverty and perhaps old age; and then, partly in reaction, there were the libertine and libertarian utopias of the late 1960s and of the revolts particularly strong in the United States and in France, of 1968. From those revolts sprang, directly and indirectly, the left-wing terrorist movements of the 1970s and early 1980s, and the libertarian and reactionary movements, the right wing movements, with occasional terrorism, of the 1980s, and 1990s, and which are with us, in some respects, even today. All of this meant the end of utopia and the rise of dystopian thinking and attitudes, and, generally, at least until recently a feeling that there were 'no alternatives', that there was - and is - "No Way Out". These were themes I wanted to explore.